A Human Technology

Summary

Podcast Summary: Mind Games – Episode 5: “A Human Technology”

Podcast: Mind Games
Host: Kaleidoscope
Episode Date: February 17, 2026

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Overview of Main Theme

This episode of Mind Games explores the controversial world of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)—a self-help methodology born in 1970s California, which claims to offer “mind control” tools for self-improvement, persuasion, and even manipulation. Hosts Zoë Lescaze and Alice Hines investigate the real-world applications and scientific standing of NLP, examining its influence on high-profile figures, its entanglements with the US military, and its surprising connection to trauma therapy EMDR. The episode also teases the dark side of NLP by connecting it to a notorious unsolved murder.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Tony Robbins, NLP, and the US Army

• NLP’s Self-Help Prestige: Tony Robbins, one of NLP’s most prominent disciples, built his massive coaching empire on NLP techniques—advising everyone from celebrities to Presidents (03:37).
• Military Interest: The US Army hired Robbins and other NLP trainers in the early 1980s to advance human performance, specifically to improve soldier marksmanship (04:05, 05:12).
• The 'Breakthrough' Pistol Training Experiment:
  • Robbins and trainer Wyatt Woodsmall claim they boosted training pass rates to 100%, halved training time and saved ammo by applying NLP-derived strategies to pistol shooting (06:00–06:16).
  • Zoë Lescaze tests the training herself, learning not just about firing pistols—but attempting to isolate the actual effect of NLP versus good coaching (07:21–09:54).

Notable Quote:

“You know I can take any training you do in the entire army, cut the training time in half and increase the competency.” — Tony Robbins (05:42)

• Skepticism from Within: Lescaze questions whether her own success in Wyatt’s “NLP” training reflected the methods or just conventional teaching (09:54).

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2. The Science (or Lack Thereof) Behind NLP

• NLP’s “Modeling” Technique: Wyatt explains NLP’s foundational idea—“modeling” experts by decoding subtle behaviors (eye movements, self-talk) that separate elite performers from others (10:26, 11:04).
• The Mantra Routine: NLP trainers use repeated cues and mantras (e.g., “Sight alignment, sight alignment, trigger squeeze...”) as cognitive anchors for peak performance (11:17).
• Testing the Results: Despite subjective claims of improvement, Lescaze and Hines stress that their experiment lacks scientific rigor and could not prove NLP’s validity (12:43).

Notable Quote:

“This proves absolutely nothing about NLP.” — Alice Hines (12:39)

• NAS Investigation & Results:
  • The National Academy of Sciences reviewed NLP’s Army experiments in 1984, finding “the design of the study was experimentally flawed and no valid conclusions can be drawn from it.” (13:15)
  • Overall, NAS concludes: “There is little or no empirical evidence to date to support either NLP assumptions or NLP effectiveness.” (14:02, 14:16)
  • Eye movement patterns, a key NLP diagnostic claim, are deemed baseless—yet their legacy endures elsewhere (14:37–14:52).

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3. NLP’s Influence on Modern Trauma Therapy: The EMDR Connection

• EMDR’s Origins: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)—now a mainstream trauma therapy—was created by Francine Shapiro, herself a trained NLPer (20:12–21:22).
• Shapiro’s Inspiration: Shapiro’s story of discovering EMDR hinges on noticing her own eye movements while processing distressing thoughts—an idea closely mirroring NLP doctrine (20:54–22:26).
• Therapeutic Innovation or “Purple Hat”?
  • Psychologist Gerald Rosen critiques EMDR’s scientific story and calls out “purple hat therapy": the process of taking an established therapy and adding a flashy, inert gimmick (i.e., the eye movements), then marketing it as new (24:37, 26:42–26:58).
  • However, unlike NLP, EMDR’s effectiveness (including the possible role of eye movements) has been subject to sustained scientific scrutiny, achieving endorsements from the Veterans Administration and the World Health Organization (28:42).

Notable Quote:

“The basic idea is that the treatment works because of known ingredients, and you add this inert element as a way to promote or market or claim that you have a new and novel treatment.” — Gerald Rosen (26:58)

• EMDR vs. NLP’s Scientific Fates:
  • EMDR committed to research and refinement; NLP, led by founder Richard Bandler, was marketed as ever-shifting and not empirically testable—undermining its scientific credibility (29:25, 30:12–30:38).

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4. Scientific and Ethical Controversies

• Bandler’s Moving Goalposts: When pressed by researchers about NLP theory, Richard Bandler evasively declared the “field is continuously changing,” making scientific study impossible (30:12).
• NLP’s Pseudoscience Stigma: The NAS report—together with Bandler’s elusive approach—effectively relegated NLP to the pseudoscience bin among serious scientists (30:56).
• A Shadow Over NLP: The episode closes with foreshadowing—the 1988 NAS report arrived as Bandler was facing a murder trial, deepening NLP’s public suspicion (31:09).

Notable Quote:

“There aren't any fixed elements or principles. So when people try to apply these rigorous scientific standards to NLP, Bandler's like, joke's on you nerds.” — Zoe Lascaze (30:38)

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Memorable Moments & Quotes (with Timestamps)

• Wyatt’s House and Guns: The blend of ordinary suburbia, guns, and Wyatt’s esoteric decorations (angelic art, Egyptian gods) offers a memorable scene (07:21–08:03).
• Zoë’s Sharpshooter Revelation:
  • “Alice, no one is more surprised than this reporter. But yeah, kind of.” — Zoe Lescaze, on hitting bullseyes (11:59)
• NLP Debunked in Real Time:
  • “This proves absolutely nothing about NLP.” — Alice Hines (12:39)
• Purple Hat Therapy Defined:
  • “It's a metaphor, basically. A purple hat therapy is what happens when you repackage an existing treatment that works with some flashy new element that does nothing.” — Alice Hines (26:47)
• NLP’s Evading Science:
  • “You can fight amongst yourself about whether this is scientific or not. I never said it was.” — Zoe Lascaze (30:38)

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Major Segments (Timestamps)

• [03:37–06:16] Tony Robbins and the US Army’s adoption of NLP for marksmanship
• [07:21–09:54] Zoe’s shooting experiment and analysis with Wyatt Woodsmall
• [12:39–14:16] Scientific debunking by the National Academy of Sciences; discussion of study flaws
• [15:51–17:57] Transition to EMDR discussion (skip ads)
• [20:12–22:26] Francine Shapiro’s (EMDR creator) background in NLP and the therapy’s rise
• [23:47–26:58] “Purple hat therapy” explained and debated
• [28:42–30:56] The divergent destinies of NLP (pseudoscience) and EMDR (mainstream)
• [31:09–end] Foreshadowing the Bandler murder trial and coming deeper dives

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Conclusion

“A Human Technology” critically examines the promises and perils of NLP’s self-help revolution—tracing its seductive techniques from military training to trauma therapy, while highlighting its enduring controversies. The episode unravels not just the shifting sands of NLP theory, but the broader hazards of hype, marketing, and guru-ism in psychology. The cliffhanger closing—hinting at a murder trial—underscores NLP’s persistent shadow.

Next Up:
The next episode promises to unravel the sensational murder trial of Richard Bandler and the unraveling of the NLP empire.

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Transcript

[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Zoe Lascaz]

It's an Olympics you'll never forget. Prime time in Milan.

[Jacob Goldstein]

The moments Chloe Kim with the gold medal.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Flex the stars, Ilya Malinin.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Out of this world.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Spectacle from beautiful northern Italy with very special guests every night of the Olympics experience the world's biggest show, prime time in Milan. Watch now on NBC. And Peacock, Take a deep breath in.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

And breathe out.

[Gerald Rosen]

Your conscious mind is going to go.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Totally away so that I can speak.

[Gerald Rosen]

Privately with your unconscious mind.

[Zoe Lascaz]

From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, this is episode five of Mind Games. I'm Zoe Lascaz.

[Alice Hines]

I'm Alice Hines.

[Zoe Lascaz]

You don't know how you did it, do you?

[Jacob Goldstein]

You're going to a little time distortion state and you're out of it.

[Zoe Lascaz]

In a previous episode we met Tony Robbins, the 6 foot 7 self help tycoon who built his empire on neuro linguistic programming or nlp. We mentioned his work with Bill Clinton celebrities ranging from Pitbull to Princess Diana and that he's introduced NLP to millions of everyday people.

[Alice Hines]

But there's one client we didn't tell you about. It's probably the biggest organization Tony's ever worked for.

[Zoe Lascaz]

We're talking annual budget just shy of $200 billion big. We do more before 9am than most.

[Jacob Goldstein]

People do all day.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Pay for a sergeant. Yep. The US Army. In the 1970s, the army began searching for new technologies to enhance human performance. In 1981, members of the Intelligence and Security Command began to investigate how they might operationalize nlp. It may seem weird that the military would look twice at nlp, the brainchild of some California lefties, but the army was in many ways a the ideal self help customer. An organization struggling with insecurity and some serious baggage. Public perception of the military had tanked with the Vietnam War and officials worried the Soviets were outpacing the us they were desperate for anything that would give them an edge.

[Alice Hines]

Didn't they also look into like alien communication technologies in this era?

[Zoe Lascaz]

What didn't they look into? They were all over the new age map. They were doing like long distance viewing, like psychic viewing experiments that continued until the 90s by the way. Anyway, the Army Intelligence and Security Command hired Richard Bandler, John Grinder and some of their NLP friends to run a whole bunch of experiments. We're going to focus on one. One of the trainers in charge was none other than Tony Robbins. His job was to see if he could improve the standard pistol training for new recruits.

[Jacob Goldstein]

You know I can take any training you do in the entire army, cut.

[Gerald Rosen]

The training time in half and increase the competency.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He said.

[Zoe Lascaz]

You're crazy and I Said, no, I'm expensive. And we negotiated this deal. Tony said that only 70% of new recruits passed the standard.45 caliber pistol training. He also said it took way too long.

[Gerald Rosen]

So I said, I'll turn that around. I'll cut it in half.

[Zoe Lascaz]

According to Tony, that's exactly what he did. 100% of the soldiers in the new NLP pistol training passed. It took half the time and the participants used half the usual ammo. And the colonel wrote a letter to.

[Jacob Goldstein]

The general saying it's the first breakthrough in pistol shooting since World War I.

[Zoe Lascaz]

I traveled down to the suburbs of Washington D.C. to meet the guy who ran the pistol experiment with Tony.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

Okay, this is the Dirty Harry special. This is the gun he uses in the movie.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Wyatt Woodsmall is now in his 80s. He's had a long career as a prominent NLP trainer who's worked with some pretty snazzy clients, including several medal winning athletes on the US Olympic dive team and major companies like Polaroid and Avery Denison. At the time of the pistol experiment, Wyatt was interpreting incoming intelligence. Richard Bandler was one of his NLP teachers. So I figured we could run a little experiment of our own. I wanted to see if NLP could make me a sharpshooter in just three days.

[Alice Hines]

This would be using NLP to do something that's very easy to measure objectively. Marksmanship. Either you hit the target or you don't.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

Okay, this. This is a.44 Magnum with an 838-inch- barrel. Smith and Wesson.

[Zoe Lascaz]

I met Wyatt at his home where we took a look at his gun collection, which he keeps upstairs in two safes the size of refrigerators. From the outside, Wyatt's house looks pretty normal. Red bricks, white trim, a two car garage. But right inside there is a giant black and gold sculpture of an Egyptian God with the head of a bird. Also many pictures of angels throughout the house, most of which are memorials to his late wife. As we looked at his guns, I found myself a little distracted by the decor. You mentioned that she had had past life experience in ancient Egypt. Did she also. What was her connection to angels?

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

She came from the angelic realm.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Wyatt handed me a gun and walked me through basic firearm safety. So neither of us ended up in the angelic realm.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

So put your finger on the trigger.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Okay.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

Squeeze slowly. So that gives you an idea of what the trigger pressure is going to be.

[Zoe Lascaz]

After shooting laser bullets in his kitchen, we graduated to live ammunition and hit the local shooting range. Okay, and could we throw in another box of 9 millimeter yes. Thanks. And could we do one more red dot target?

[Gerald Rosen]

Yep.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Bullets in hand, we donned our goggles and went inside.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Everybody ready?

[Zoe Lascaz]

There was a line of booths separated by bulletproof glass, and the floors were littered with brass shells. It was busy, even on a Monday afternoon. It was tough to dial into Wyatt's advice, with guns going off constantly and unpredictably.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

Red dot on the X.

[Zoe Lascaz]

And so this one raced herself.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

Lean forward slightly.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Okay.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

Be in balance like you were. And squeeze the tree.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Okay. Wyatt kept moving the target back.

[Gerald Rosen]

Okay.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

Right in the middle.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Right in the middle. Perfect. Not bad for my first time out with a pistol. Hell of a teacher, Wyatt. We celebrated with lunch at Red Lobster. I was feeling pretty hyped about my progress, but I was beginning to wonder. Okay, so my big question is, how is this NLP versus just teaching someone how to shoot a gun?

[Alice Hines]

You read my mind.

[Zoe Lascaz]

I pressed Wyatt to explain what he was doing with me and how it came out of his work with the Army. Wyatt says he developed these methods by modeling expert marksmen. Champion shooters from the Army Marksmanship Unit. The premise is that people who are really good at what they do usually can't explain what exactly makes them exceptional. Modeling involves observing and interviewing experts until you decode what they're doing, physically and mentally. That gives them an edge.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

And we notice their eyes would flick up into visual remembered.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Visual remembered. In NLP terms, that means the expert's eyes flicked up and to the left before they took a shot.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

If you're constructing pictures, your eyes would go up here.

[Zoe Lascaz]

He glanced up.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

If you're feeling sensations and feelings, your eyes would go down here.

[Zoe Lascaz]

He looked down and to his left.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

If you're talking to yourself, your eyes would go down here.

[Alice Hines]

NLP is really big on eye movements. You're going to hear more about them later. In this episode, Wyatt noticed that right.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Before each marksman pulled the trigger, he pictured perfect sight alignment. The small bits of iron at the end of the barrel framing the bullseye. So Wyatt and Tony created a kind of mantra routine for the trainees.

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

Sight alignment. Sight alignment. Sight alignment. Trigger, squeeze, trigger, squeeze, Trigger, squeeze. Bang. Recover. Sight line on sideline. On. Sight line on trigger. Squeeze, trigger, squeeze, Bang. Recover.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Wyatt taught me this mantra, and it did seem to help Wyatt. Day three of the Great Shooting Experiment. How are you feeling about how it's gone so far?

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

I think it's going superbly well. I am surprised at how well you're doing.

[Alice Hines]

Okay, so Zoe's a sharpshooter now.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Alice. No one is more surprised than this reporter. But yeah, kind of. By day three, I was consistently hitting bullseyes at 25 yards, which is far. It's like the length of a tennis court. It's also one of the standard distances the army uses in their pistol training courses. So if I did it with accuracy, I would qualify as an expert.

[Alice Hines]

So the funny thing about this whole experiment is that, okay, yes, on the surface it's like, wow, NLP worked. But also like, low key's always really good at everything.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Excuse me, look at who is talking. Google her. Uh huh, sure. Except not blushing, apparently. Alice.

[Alice Hines]

Okay, so, but here's the thing. This proves absolutely nothing about nlp.

[Zoe Lascaz]

No, it doesn't. We have no idea if I would have done any better or worse with another type of training. And we're not the only ones who struggle to find hard evidence for whether NLP works. In 1984, the Army Research Institute asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the various human enhancement technologies it had been pursuing. And a group of researchers in cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, and a bunch of other related fields took a hard look at nlp.

[Alice Hines]

And they were pretty damning. Here's what the National Academy of Sciences said about that marksmanship experiment. The design of the study was experimentally flawed and no valid conclusions can be drawn from it.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Basically, the NAS said the Army's pistol experiment was too informal to matter. NLP trainers boasted about the apparent improvement over the standard training, but it was impossible to compare them.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah, because the two trainings took place in completely different locations. Real experiments are supposed to eliminate variables like this. In this one, there were a million factors that could have affected shooter performance, like how hot the room was, how much sleep the recruits had, et cetera, et cetera.

[Zoe Lascaz]

So the army never implemented the new NLP pistol training methods. And it discontinued its other NLP programs too.

[Alice Hines]

The NAS report probably didn't help. This quote's the kicker for me. Overall, there is little or no empirical evidence to date to support either NLP assumptions or NLP effectiveness.

[Zoe Lascaz]

So harsh. This is partly why people began to see NLP as a pseudoscience. But to be fair, the NAS researchers were only looking at a few aspects of NLP that seemed important at the time. They reviewed 20 papers, mostly focused on whether you can persuade people using NLP specifically by clocking their eye movements.

[Alice Hines]

That's this idea in NLP that your eye movements provide a cheat code to your thoughts.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Yeah, so the NAS said that just doesn't work. There's zero correlation between visualizing something and glancing upwards for instance.

[Alice Hines]

But eye movements didn't go away. In fact, they inspired one of the most prevalent trauma therapies on the market today, emdr. I dug into the secret backstory of EMDR and realized something like NLP is still being used by veterans, albeit under a different name.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you backtest it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors, llc, SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures [e-mail] disclosures let's talk about modern home shopping.

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[Zoe Lascaz]

Prime time in Milan, the moments Chloe Kim with the gold medal. Flex the stars Ilya Malinin.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Out of this world.

[Zoe Lascaz]

The spectacle from beautiful northern Italy with very special guests every night of the Olympics. Experience the world's biggest show, prime time in Milan. Watch now on NBC. And Peacock.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Oh, the big game commercials are basically must see tv.

[Alice Hines]

Well, I take bathroom breaks during the game, so I don't miss anything.

[Gerald Rosen]

Smart.

[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Alice Hines]

That sounds amazing.

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It's called Melissa and it's absurd in the best way. It stars Melissa McCarthy, TV doctor Nicholas Gonzalez and iconic telenovela villain Ita Ticanto Raul. But the real star, Elf Glow Reviver Lip Oil.

[Alice Hines]

Oh, okay, I see where this is going.

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[Alice Hines]

Available in 10 shades and only $9 each.

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Watch the full episode of their new elf novella on soyunbanyo.com yes, and drench.

[Alice Hines]

Your lips in an addictive sheer wash of ultra glossy color with Elf Glow Rev. You are looking at a radical new form of psychotherapy. The key is the patient's eyes shifting back and forth in a process that mysteriously unlocks the trauma of times past. Trauma like war. This is a 2020 investigation from 1994 into eye movement desensitization therapy, better known as EMDR. It's being practiced by some 7,000 therapists across the country and the numbers are growing. It's a combination of traditional talk therapy with something that sounds bizarre. Here's how EMDR works. A therapist moves their fingers or an object in front of the patient's eyes. The patient follows those movements while thinking of an upsetting or traumatic memory. By 2024, over 7 million people had been successfully treated by more than 100,000 therapists, according to the EMDR Association. The military is one of the biggest proponents of emdr. It's one of only three, quote, evidence based treatments for PTSD endorsed by the Veterans Affairs Health Administration. Here's an official video from the Veterans Administration PTSD portal.

[Zoe Lascaz]

If the belief you hold that's attached to your trauma is that I'm worthless.

[Redfin Narrator]

And that's been true for however long.

[Zoe Lascaz]

You'Ve been surviving this trauma or as we move through the treatment, that belief is going to stop feeling so true and we're going to bring in a positive belief.

[Alice Hines]

EMDR was invented in 1987 by Francine Shapiro, a PhD student in psychology. Here's how she describes her eureka moment. She was on a walk one day in the park. She was thinking about something disturbing and she noticed her eyes moving in a certain way. Then the thought no longer upset her. Here's Shapiro on 20 20. If I had seen you that day.

[Zoe Lascaz]

In the park, what would I have.

[Alice Hines]

Noticed about your eyes?

[Zoe Lascaz]

That they were moving very rapidly in a diagonal, just flickering up and down very, very rapidly. So I thought I stumbled upon some.

[Gerald Rosen]

Mind process that worked with thought and.

[Zoe Lascaz]

That'S what was so fascinating because I hadn't been doing it deliberately, but I noticed that it happening. So she's saying she noticed her own eyes moving when she was thinking about something disturbing and that eye movements are connected to thought. Sounds familiar.

[Alice Hines]

And turns out it's not a coincidence. Shapiro was an NLP trainer, not something she often promoted about herself. Her whole story about inventing EMDR at the park struck some people as a little fishy. I've read that eye movements are hard to notice yourself. They're really small and subtle. So what seems likely is that Shapiro was inspired by NLP and primed to notice eye movements.

[Zoe Lascaz]

One of the findings of the neuro linguistic programming research.

[Alice Hines]

Here's Zoe reading. An article Shapiro wrote in 1985, two years before she created EMDR, is that.

[Zoe Lascaz]

All people cross culturally, with the exception of the Basque nationality, show how they are thinking by the way their eyes move. Using neuro linguistic programming, people are shown how to tap into their personal power, change their state of mind and psychology at will and access a state of total confidence whenever they encounter a situation that they would otherwise find frightening or upsetting.

[Alice Hines]

Gerald Rosen is a psychologist and clinical professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. He's written about EMDR's secret origins.

[Gerald Rosen]

Their theory was pseudoscientific and bizarrely in their theory was that their statements about these eye patterns didn't apply to the Basque people. What kind of crazy thing is this?

[Alice Hines]

You mean like people from the Basque country in Spain, right?

[Gerald Rosen]

Yes. To give you the overview, EMDR is a novel technique that focuses on eye movements. The foundation of it was discovered by Shapiro when she was going for a walk in 1987. By good chance, she needed a dissertation and it's a great thing for the clinical world. That's a positive overview. The other overview is that Shapiro was a manipulative marketer who took off from NLP and developed her method.

[Alice Hines]

Gerald is uniquely sensitive to snake oil. As a young clinical psychologist, he researched phobia cures and published in peer reviewed journals. Then he wrote a self help book summarizing his research for the general public. And his publisher exaggerated the results on the book jacket to sell more copies. Gerald's been on a mission to expose gurus who overpromise ever since.

[Gerald Rosen]

The paradigm in psychology is that gurus are developing their treatments frequently, if not always. It involves elements that are known to be effective ingredients to intervene and help people. They package it in a way. They have a name and then they have their acronym, and then they give workshops, and then you can get certified in it. And it's just a model that's based on gurus. It attracts charismatic people. We sell the public on this idea that they got to be buying these products to get happy. No one's talking to them sensibly about just the difficult state of the human situation and how we're coping with all these things. Here are some good tools we know about.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Okay, so it does seem like Shapiro may have been interested in eye movements because of NLP. But NLPers generally don't direct eye movements. They observe them. It's a way of reading people's thoughts. Yes.

[Alice Hines]

So at the time Shapiro developed emdr, there was nothing in the NLP literature on using eye movements to treat trauma. It was mostly a diagnostic. So this could have been a real innovation by Shapiro, even if she were influenced by nlp. Although NLP co founder Jon Grinder did claim to have invented EMDR after it got big.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Another day, another NLP turf war.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah, so Grinder says Shapiro stole EMDR from him and he wasn't happy that Shapiro, his former office assistant, was went and copyrighted it.

[Zoe Lascaz]

So juicy.

[Alice Hines]

Grinder's account doesn't line up with Shapiro's story, of course. She claims she discovered EMDR during a walk in the park, and Shapiro died in 2019. So we couldn't ask her about all of these claims. But we did reach out to the EMDR foundation for comment, and they didn't get back to us.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's back up though. Everything I've read indicates the NLP theories of eye movements are bogus. But they are apparently helpful in emdr.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah, I mean, it depends on who you ask. Gerald says you don't need the eye movements for EMDR to work. So in the case of emdr, the element that you think is effective is the exposure therapy portion of it. Right. Like that seems like it could be helping people with trauma.

[Gerald Rosen]

It's a wonderful structure. I give her credit. Except for the fact that other people were reporting this structure.

[Alice Hines]

At the same time, when EMDR came out, exposure therapy, which is revisiting a traumatic memory repeatedly in detail with a therapist, was already a treatment. And so for this reason, Gerald calls EMDR a purple hat therapy.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Sorry, Purple hat therapy. The therapist is wearing a purple hat. Fabulous.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah. So kind of it's a metaphor, basically. A purple hat therapy is what happens when you repackage an existing treatment that works with some flashy new element that does nothing.

[Gerald Rosen]

The basic idea is that the treatment works because of known ingredients, and you add this inert element as a way to promote or market or claim that you have a new and novel treatment.

[Alice Hines]

So it's basically a placebo effect.

[Gerald Rosen]

Well, no. A placebo effect is where you're taking something that has no known active ingredient other than the very general specific impact of suggestion and telling someone it's a treatment. And here you really have a treatment effect. So if I have someone with a phobia and I tell them how they should practice driving to get over their fear, that isn't placebo. That's the real use of guided exposure to overcome an anxiety problem, which is.

[Alice Hines]

A part of cognitive behavioral therapy, which has evidence behind it, right?

[Gerald Rosen]

Absolutely. So it's adding nonsense to an active ingredient. And people could do that, truly believing in what they're doing. Or you could have people who know it's a purple hat. But this is a way to start a new company.

[Alice Hines]

According to Gerald, the purple hat in EMDR is the eye movements which Shapiro marketed and copyrighted, selling workshops to therapists that today go for several thousand dollars.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Ahead.

[Alice Hines]

Zoe. I should disclose that Gerald is in the minority as a skeptic today. Why eye movements work hasn't been proven, but the majority of researchers think they actually are an active ingredient in EMDR treatment. So not a purple hat.

[Zoe Lascaz]

So what should we make of this, Alice? I mean, how is it possible that NLP is so scientifically maligned while EMDR has not only stood up to scrutiny, but gotten all this mainstream credibility? It's endorsed by the World Health Organization, when in fact, they share some common elements.

[Alice Hines]

So one reason could be that EMDR was a lot more savvy in presenting itself to researchers. EMDR's creator, Francine Shapiro, took great care in her method to whittle it down to a specific testable theory. And then over a few decades, researchers did the slow, boring, but important work of actually testing what about eye movements helps or doesn't, and they're still testing it.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Meanwhile, Richard Bandler pulled techniques from a bunch of sources, called them NLP and made wild claims about what they could achieve, like curing schizophrenics or phobias in 10 minutes.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah, and Bandler didn't stop there. He marketed NLP pretty unscrupulously as a sexy new persuasion technology to men in suits. He was trying to get rich. And it worked. Real psychologists noticed.

[Zoe Lascaz]

And when those researchers from the National Academy of Science were trying to study nlp, Richard Bandler basically made it impossible. They met with him in July 1986. They'd done their homework. They'd read all of his books to date. But when they interviewed him about things like eye movements that seemed like a really big deal, Bandler was just like, oh, yeah, those. Forget about them.

[Alice Hines]

Weird.

[Zoe Lascaz]

And the scientists were equally flummoxed. Bandler told them NLP's continuously changing. He wasn't interested in building up a solid, unchanging theory over time. You can just discard elements whenever you get sick of them.

[Alice Hines]

So if NLP is just a process that can involve literally any technique at any time, it's impossible to test or hold to any scientific standard.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Exactly. There aren't any fixed elements or principles. So when people try to apply these rigorous scientific standards to nlp, Bandler's like, joke's on you nerds. You can fight amongst yourself about whether this is scientific or not. I never said it was.

[Alice Hines]

The NAS report discredited NLP to a lot of important people. It was basically the nail in the coffin for NLP gaining mainstream respect. People have been calling it a pseudoscience ever since.

[Zoe Lascaz]

But it was not the only thing that made people wary of NLP. The NAS report came out in January 1988.

[Alice Hines]

Oh, my God. January 1988.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Literally, as Bandler's entire life and business is crumbling.

[Alice Hines]

Yeah. His entire future was hanging in the balance at this exact moment. What did you see when you first saw the case against Richard Bandler at face value?

[Wyatt Woodsmall]

It was overwhelming evidence of guilt.

[Zoe Lascaz]

You know, it doesn't look good. You got two guys in a room with a woman, and you know, the woman's dead, and each of the two guys are pointing at each other.

[Alice Hines]

Richard Bandler stands trial for murder. Next time on Mind Games. Mind Games is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series is is created and hosted by me, Alice Hines and Zoe Lascoz. It's produced by Ryder Allsopp and Dara Luckpotz. Edited by Kate Osborne. Editorial consulting from Adeza Egan. Original composition and mixing by Steve Bone.

[Zoe Lascaz]

Fact checking by Eamonn Whalen. From Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Oz Wolosian, Mangesh Hatikador and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Etor. Special thanks to Wyatt Woodsmall for the shooting lessons and to Chris and Holly Darling for hosting our team. Sometimes all we want is more of the same. Like another round of golf played from a channel with 247 coverage, another look at the garden and the deer as they pick their way through it, another Taco Tuesday followed by a Whatever's in the Fridge Wednesday. And to get more of the same, all we need is a little help with adaptable care plans from qualified compassionate caregivers matched to your family's needs. Home Instead can help you and your passion stay home no matter what's on your horizon. Visit Home instead online for a better what's next? There's a fire inside you you can't ignore.

[Alice Hines]

Stand still. Not a chance.

[Zoe Lascaz]

You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we are here to help you keep going further. Capella University what can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn more.

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